600% updated processing
via accelerated weekend sales
25%
Improved hardware efficiency
Company Overview
Freudenberg IT KG is a global cloud and IT service provider for midsized enterprises. At home in the automotive and manufacturing sectors, the company delivers a broad range of IT services for almost the entire SAP ERP landscape and is also a Microsoft partner. In 2019, Freudenberg IT was acquired by Syntax Systems, a leading provider of cloud-managed ERP services.
Business Challenge
As an SAP outsourcing partner, Freudenberg IT’s primary focus is on software products from SAP, as well as other integrated products. Freudenberg IT coordinates and manages key business processes for its customers across almost 100 different systems, including more than 80 SAP database servers and many application servers. As Freudenberg IT’s usage of SAP increased and it deployed additional components, both the number of processes and administrative overhead costs grew. With more to manage, the processing operation slowed down.
Solution
Freudenberg IT needed an enterprise-wide automation solution that could coordinate business and IT processes for its customers and could handle the growing complexity at greater speed and lower cost. As an outsourced service provider, the IT team needed to support a variety of complex requirements: UNIX and Windows NT platform coverage; multiple client facilities; seamless integration with all of the standard SAP facilities; and external definition and maintenance of SAP tasks. They also needed centralized management and control of output and log files, a single point of control, load balancing, and SAP BAPI integration and certification.
Freudenberg IT selected to RunMyJobs by Redwood solution to take advantage of hybrid processes and data orchestration across all on-premises, cloud, and containerized environments. Redwood seamlessly coordinates and integrates legacy applications, data, OS activity and web API interactions with any system, application, or technology in on-prem and cloud or SaaS environments. These orchestration capabilities enable migration to cloud-based applications with few changes to business processes.
Now, Freudenberg IT’s SAP users have the power to connect and automate business and IT processes across their entire enterprise landscape under a single solution. Redwood also supports governance and compliance by automatically logging all automation, user activity, and artifacts from automated processes for comprehensive auditing. Fine-grained data and access policies, including SSO and SAML 2.0+, are supported natively. Departments, applications, or business units can be logically separated through partitions.
Results
Because Redwood provides Freudenberg IT with real-time process automation throughout the enterprise, it now has much better control over its ICT environment. This enables the company to use hardware 25% more efficiently while reducing administration overhead and increasing flexibility to manage change.
Redwood allows Freudenberg to initiate many SAP processes at once. For example, a complex process with 20 steps no longer needs to run sequentially, saving time and money. As a result, the firm has reduced its weekend SAP sales update processing from 36 hours to fewer than 6 – a 6-fold improvement.
For overnight processing, Freudenberg integrated Redwood into its alert management system to notify on-call staff of any significant errors. This alerting accelerates issue resolution and ensures processes are successfully completed before the next business morning.
The productivity gains that we have realized have been good […] processing is successfully completed in plenty of time for the following day.“ Peter Oswald, Data Center Infrastructure Manager, Freudenberg IT